Tagged: pastry

Pâte à choux (pronounced “pah-ta-zhoo”) is what one might call the universal French dough. From only four main ingredients — butter + liquid (water or milk) + flour + eggs — comes the basis for many types of pastries.

There are the famously French éclairs and profiteroles, and the more American cream puffs and crullers. Gougères take the dough in a savory direction, and the towering croquembouche in its spun sugar cage is an edible masterpiece. But it’s sweet little chouquettes that are my personal favorite.

Anatole France, a French poet, journalist, and Nobel Prize-winning novelist, once remarked: “Life is too short and Proust is too long.”

Published in a series of seven volumes between the years 1913 and 1927, Marcel Proust’s novel Remembrance of Things Past is a narrated telling of his own (fictionalized) life story. More than 4,000 pages, it is indeed a very challenging read. His allegorical search for truth is defined by the concept of “involuntary memory” — literally, spontaneous remembrances of thingspast, flashbacks, triggered by everyday actions, sights, sounds, tastes, smells.

The most famous of Proust’s literary recollections, an evocation of a profound childhood remembrance upon tasting a crumbly, tea-dipped madeleine.*